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Atlanta Still Struggles To Recover From Ransomware Attack (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader quotes Reuters:
Atlanta's top officials holed up in their offices on Saturday as they worked to restore critical systems knocked out by a nine-day-old cyber attack that plunged the Southeastern U.S. metropolis into technological chaos and forced some city workers to revert to paper... Police and other public servants have spent the past week trying to piece together their digital work lives, recreating audit spreadsheets and conducting business on mobile phones in response to one of the most devastating "ransomware" virus attacks to hit an American city. Three city council staffers have been sharing a single clunky personal laptop brought in after cyber extortionists attacked Atlanta's computer network with a virus that scrambled data and still prevents access to critical systems. "It's extraordinarily frustrating," said Councilman Howard Shook, whose office lost 16 years of digital records...
City officials have declined to discuss the extent of damage beyond disclosed outages that have shut down some services at municipal offices, including courts and the water department. Nearly 6 million people live in the Atlanta metropolitan area... Atlanta police returned to taking written case notes and have lost access to some investigative databases, department spokesman Carlos Campos told Reuters... Meanwhile, some city employees complained they have been left in the dark, unsure when it is safe to turn on their computers. "We don't know anything," said one frustrated employee as she left for a lunch break on Friday.
"Our data management teams are working diligently to restore normal operations and functionalities to these systems," said a spokesperson for the police department, adding that they "hope to be back online in the very near future."
City officials have declined to discuss the extent of damage beyond disclosed outages that have shut down some services at municipal offices, including courts and the water department. Nearly 6 million people live in the Atlanta metropolitan area... Atlanta police returned to taking written case notes and have lost access to some investigative databases, department spokesman Carlos Campos told Reuters... Meanwhile, some city employees complained they have been left in the dark, unsure when it is safe to turn on their computers. "We don't know anything," said one frustrated employee as she left for a lunch break on Friday.
"Our data management teams are working diligently to restore normal operations and functionalities to these systems," said a spokesperson for the police department, adding that they "hope to be back online in the very near future."
They should all be sacked.
Backups. Backups. Backups.
Simple. Known process.
Not done = sacked.
We complain bitterly about problems with industrial espionage and yet we still cheap out and use crapware swiss cheese .Net garbage that hackers in China and Russian can drive a truck through.
This message was not sent from an iPhone because Peter Sellers really was a deviated prevert without a dime for the call
It could be very convenient. No further audits are possible, since all documents are gone. All is to start from zero.
Yes, they should all be sacked.
No, not the IT guys. The beancounters and managers who ignored their advice and failed to foresee the need for a proper backup management strategy for the city. IT knows this crap can happen, and IT tells Management about the need for proper backups, daily, weekly, monthly, on-site, off-site, and tape. We tell them RAID is not a backup strategy. WE tell them without backups their necks are in the noose when, not if, the shit hits the fan.
Well, 9 days ago, the fan got crushed under 16 tons of Grade-A manure. And a LOT of necks are about to get wrung. Sure, IT will get fired, they always do. But this time, everyone who was against backups is gonna go down with them. Cause its not IT's fault the city chose not to have solid backup strategies in place with the vulnerabilities of today, that fault lies solely with everyone who said it was too expensive for no return, too much time for something that didn't make money, or that "education" would be enough protection so we don't need other solutions.
Who can expect anyone to believe they "lost 16 years" of data? 192 consecutive months without backups? Zero offline storage? Pull the other one: it's got bells on it!
Nonsense! 100% daily backups of systems, using a suite of tools kept offline except during backups activity is ALWAYS a solution....simply because an attack starts at a particular time; anything you've kept offline prior to that time is a resource to be used to recover. Yes, there is the problem of recapturing the lost data in that time interval, but it's a LOT better than having to start redesigning software from scratch AFTER the attack has occurred!
100% daily backups, with recycling of media over a period of a few weeks is a MANDATORY requirement for every computer under my management. Since I started doing that in 2001, I have never had (nor has any client had) an unrecoverable loss of data.
The other trick is keeping data separated from executables. My mantra is "C: is for Code, D: is for Data". The idea that everything should be on the same logical drive is simply WRONG.
There are no perfectly secure systems, and perfection is a fools game. But, simple strategies, unerringly repeated over time, can make recovery from assaults (or hard-disk failure) a straight-forward solution.
So has Georgia actually passed a law that will effectively make the investigation of this ransomware attack illegal? That would be both stupid and highly amusing.
They don't know. All the laws were on the servers.
Just another day in Paradise